BiDi in Terminal Emulators
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A draft proposal for handling RTL and BiDi text in terminal emulators

Implementations

Here I’m planning to maintain a list of implementations that are known to support BiDi according to this specification.

I do not intend to maintain a list of those that do some BiDi, but not in accordance with this specs. See XVilka’s site for such an effort.

VTE

VTE is the terminal emulation widget behind GNOME Terminal and a bunch of other terminal emulator applications.

BiDi support according to this specification (level 1 only for the time being) is planned to be added to VTE version 0.58, released along with GNOME 3.34 in September 2019.

The current work-in-progress implementation is quite robust and showcases the features pretty well. There are still some bugs to fix and lots of code cleanup to do.

The work-in-progress implementation resides in the wip/egmont/bidi branch. To give it a try, install the standard GTK+ development packages as well as fribidi-1.0, and follow these steps:

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte.git
cd vte
git checkout wip/egmont/bidi
./autogen.sh --enable-debug
make
./src/app/vte-2.91

or optionally

VTE_DEBUG=bidi ./src/app/vte-2.91

to highlight on the screen every character that has RTL resolved directionality, plus get some debug info printed as well.

See the file BIDI-STATUS inside the repository for what’s already supported and what’s not, plus a few convenience aliases.

Make sure to check out this cool test: cat doc/bidi.txt.